Be careful where you put that chocolate

Never put free chocolate in your purse. It might be acceptable in the winter but not in the summer. We recently visited a place I have always been curious about.

We went to Hershey, Pennsylvania, last week. It really does have streetlights shaped like Hershey Kisses. The subtle smell of chocolate is everywhere. A single day is enough to sample a tiny bit of what the town is about. A week or so would be better. 

We highly recommend the trolley tour. I should warn you that the seats on the trolley are highly polished and very slippery oak. Beautiful, but although the driver was wonderful, we slid against each other and thought we were going to end up in the aisle several times. 

The tour guide was dressed in period clothes. She kept her composure through the journey although her microphone quit working several times. At various points in her spiel she passed out baskets of candy. The first baskets held Kisses. I slipped mine into my purse. 

The second round of Kisses also went into my purse. At some point we passed the Reeses factory and were told a very important fact. The word is pronounced ree-suz. The way I pronounce it, ree-cees is wrong. So now we all know. 

At the end of the trip we were given full sized chocolate bars. Being bigger, they didn’t suffer the same fate as the Kisses. They were pliable but not liquid. By this time the Kisses were very soft. I placed them on the counter when we got back to our hotel. They solidified but the foil and chocolate were melted together to the point that they could not be separated. 

I thought it was interesting to learn that Milton Hershey failed time and time again at various professions before settling on candy making. Even then, success didn’t come easy. 

At the time, chocolate bars as we know them, didn’t exist. The candy of choice was caramels. Hershey tried making chocolate covered caramels. At a party he noticed that a group of boys kept coming back for one handful after another. Out of curiosity, he followed them. The boys were sucking the chocolate off of the candies and spitting the caramel insides onto a bush. 

Hershey decided to concentrate on chocolate making. Adding milk to the chocolate lowered the cost and made a tastier product. 

He located his business in Pennsylvania, in cattle country. Hershey’s is one of the only large-scale chocolate makers in the world that still uses fresh milk. It gives the Hershey's traditional milk chocolate bars the distinctive Hershey taste people have loved for 120 years. If I remember right, milk comes from farms that are within 70 miles of the factory. Each day,  tankers carrying fresh milk line up to deliver their goods — and in less than 72 hours that creamy milk is used to make delicious chocolate. 

Once the chocolate business took off Hershey repaid everyone he had borrowed money from. We learned that he built a town, a hospital, a school and many other things to benefit the people who worked for him. 

From the beginning, Milton Hershey believed that if you do good, you’ll do well. 

In addition to chocolate that melts in my purse, the other lessons imparted by the trip to a town founded on chocolate, is that perseverance is the key to success. 

Hershey failed time and time again. It was perseverance and a belief in himself that ultimately led to those melted blobs of once yummy candy. The other lesson is that people deserve respect and common courtesy both they and their employer will ultimately succeed. 

I am so glad that Milton Hershey didn’t give up, even if I did get chocolate all over my purse.